Tuesday, November 10, 2015

Many of my columns speak highly of the wisdom of our nation's founders," writes economist and author Walter E. Williams.

"Every once in a while, I receive an ugly letter sarcastically asking what do I think of their wisdom declaring blacks 'three-fifths of a human.'

"It's difficult to tell whether such a question is prompted by ignorance or is the fruit of an ongoing agenda to undermine American greatness. Let's examine some facts about our founders and slavery."

Here are two important paragraphs from Williams:

At the time of the 1787 Constitutional Convention, slaves were 40 percent of the population of southern colonies. Apportionment in the House of Representatives and the number of electoral votes each state would have in presidential elections would be based upon population. Southern colonies wanted slaves to be counted as one person. Northern delegates to the convention, and those opposed to slavery, wanted to count only free persons of each state for the purposes of apportionment in the House of Representatives and the Electoral College. The compromise reached was that each slave would be counted as only three-fifths of a person.

If the convention delegates had not reached this compromise, the Constitution would have not been ratified and there would not have been a Union. My questions to those who criticize the three-fifths clause are twofold. Would it have been preferable for the southern states to be able to count slaves as whole persons, thereby giving southern states more political power? Would blacks have been better off without constitutional ratification and a Union made possible by the three-fifths compromise? In other words, would blacks have been better off with northern states having gone their way and southern states having gone theirs and, as a consequence, no U.S. Constitution and no Union? Abolitionist Frederick Douglass understood the compromise, saying that the three-fifths clause was "a downright disability laid upon the slaveholding states" that deprived them of "two-fifths of their natural basis of representation."

In other words, the three-fifths clause was an attack on the power base of the slaveholding states, not an attack on the humanity of black people.

"With union," Williams writes, "Congress at least had the power to abolish slave trade in 1808. According to delegate James Wilson, many believed the anti-slave-trade clause laid 'the foundation for banishing slavery out of this country'."